Our governing authorities rightly look to protect women from
sexual predators. Conversely, the
culture encourages sexual an attitude of sexual freedom. Popular wisdom holds that the easy access to birth
control and abortion liberates females to explore sexuality as partners with
men.

Ms. Young’s article suggests that liberation has muddied the
already murky waters of sexual relations; making it ever trickier to navigate
the hazardous channels of love, sex and romance.

Let’s look back at how are arrived here and what roles state
and culture played.

Beginning in the 19th Century, Sigmund Freud taught
that society’s ills are squarely rooted in the repressive Victorian sexual
attitudes.

That may be so said Margaret
Sanger, but what about us women? We
can’t let loose without getting pregnant?
We need birth control if we are to have sexual equality and enjoy the
therapeutic benefits of a fulfilling sex life.

Soon the churches fell in line. At the 1930 Lambeth conference the Anglican Church
became the first major confession to get on board with birth control and in
front of the sexual revolution. Come the
Sixties and the Pill and the rest virginity was no longer an option.

Now all of this is fine with us libertarians so far. We really don’t care who hooks up with whom
so long as it is between consenting adults and they assume responsibility for
any adverse outcomes. Yet, once again
democracy rears its ugly head.

Over two centuries ago in his Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith observed that there exist separate
moral stands for the well-to-do versus the hoi polloi because, let’s face it,
they could afford to be bad:

“In every civilized
society, in every society where the distinction of ranks has once been
completely established, there have been always two different schemes or systems
of morality current at the same time; of which the one may be called the strict
or austere; the other the liberal, or, if you will, the loose system. The
former is generally admired and revered by the common people; the latter is
commonly more esteemed and adopted by what are called the people of fashion.”

In the modern age, we workaday folks live vicariously
through Hollywood celebrities, pop stars and jet setters who leap from bed to
bed and from marriage to marriage because they can write big checks when the
fit hits the Shan.

“How can this be fair?” cry the pleaders for the poor and
oppressed? Why are the wealthy more entitled to a good time in the sack than
us? Isn’t that a basic right? Margaret Sanger dragged class conflict into
the already hazardous battle of the sexes, when she wrote about the “knowledge of birth control, so carefully
guarded and so secretly practiced by the women of the wealthy class -- and so
tenaciously withheld from the working women”. A central argument in the pro-legal abortion
position is that rich women can always “go away” to have their problem “taken
care of” safely while the poor girls fall prey to back alley butchers.

In no time, sexual fulfillment became a right with birth
control and abortion becoming entitlements.
With this, men and women arrived at equality in the bedroom, able to
indulge risk-free pleasure that was often taxpayer subsidized.

We should now be a socialist dreamland of equality with men
and women essentially neutered and turned into indiscriminant pleasure seeking
bio-droids. With the playing field
leveled by legislation and litigation, it should be open season for guys and
gals to find regret free trysts.

However, something has gone wrong. Despite the best efforts of gender levelers
there are still differences in how the sexes survey the sexual battlefield. Vive la difference!

Margaret Sanger herself saw this when she wrote, “There is
no doubt that the natural aim of the sexual impulse is the sexual act, yet when
the impulse is strongest and followed by the sexual act without love or any of
the relative instincts which go to make up love, the relations are invariably
followed by a feeling of disgust.”

She concludes, “Respect for each other and for one's self is
a primary essential to this intimate relation.”

What is happening and what is documented by Cathy Young’s Reason article, is that the breaking
down of cultural and biological barriers to sexual gratification often results
in impersonal hook-ups that engender that “feeling of disgust” and loss of self
respect and resentment of the casual partner.
In other words, buyer’s remorse.

One is tempted to say caveat
emptor, live and learn. However the
backlash now often carries considerable penalties for men who mistakenly
believed that they equal participants in a mutually agreeable shag fest.

The lessons for libertarians here are that, yes, we endorse
equality before the law and strong protections against sexual predators. But let us also remember that the strength of
a free society lies in diversity, including some hardwired differences between
the sexes no matter how much we would like to deny them.

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Monday, December 23, 2013

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Doug Gansler wonders
aloud why a state that has, in his estimation, “literally the smartest people
in the country” is having such problems getting ACA enrollment right.

Here is what Gansler doesn’t get. It doesn’t matter how many smart people there
are in Maryland. Any centrally market
disruption is bound to fail. No one can
doubt that there were plenty of smart people in Soviet Union or in the entire
Eastern Block, yet conditions were miserable, there was no prosperity.

However, just beyond the Wall, West Germany and
Western Europe experience a spectacular post World War II recovery.

Ditto with the PRC.
Life there was fairly primitive, while free Hong Kong was setting the
business world on fire.

Centrally planned systems are doomed to failure. That’s because no individual or group of individuals
can ever possess the knowledge that resides with thousands or millions of
freely acting producers, consumers and middlemen. F. A. Hayek demonstrates that order in a
society emerges spontaneously from countless numbers of people making even more
countless decisions based upon their estimate of what best suites their particular
needs. Those decisions that are
successful get repeated and emulated while those that fail are discarded. This
how a healthy society evolves adapts and grows without guidance from some all
powerful planner.

So, back to Obamacare and back to Maryland. The Dems can argue all that they want who is
to blame for the ACA’s flubbed execution and who is most competent to handle
it. It is a losing proposition from the
get-go no matter who is in charge because it is impossible for a handful of
politicians and technocrats to guess what is most right and satisfactory for
each and every citizen. The longer that
is takes them to realize this, the crabbier everyone in Maryland will be.

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Saturday, December 7, 2013

News of fast
food labor strikes continues pouring in.
Minimum wage workers are looking to increase their hourly wage to $15,
which they contend to be a “just” living wage.
In my own Soprano State of New
Jersey, the voters have
recently approved a state constitutional amendment to increase the minimum
wage by a buck and to mandate annual cost-of-living increases.

Please indulge me in a little thought exercise.

Let’s say that you go down to you local burger joint to ask
for a job. The boss tells you that he can pay $7 but say that you want $15. He says “too bad, take it or leave it”. So you take it. However you also take an additional $8 from
the cash register for every hour that you worked in order to get up the $15 per
hour that you feel you deserve.

Most people would call that stealing. If most of your coworkers did it, the burger
joint might soon be out of business and you would need to find a new gig.

Now let’s consider another scenario. As before, you apply for the job, you ask for
$15 and the boss offers $7. This time
you pull a gun on the boss and tell him that it will be $15. End of discussion. You also make sure that you bring your gun
with you on payday to ensure that you are getting your $15 per hour.

If nothing else, this method is more honest and straightforward
than stealing from the register. At
least the boss knows where his money is going.
Still, most people would still call it a crime.

Now let’s run through this one more time.

You and your fellow workers convince your elected
representatives that you really deserve $15 an hour, not $7. So then the State sends your boss a note informing
him that he will be giving you a nice raise.
The letter also advises your boss that he must do so under the penalty
of law. “Penalty of law” is a polite way
of saying that guys with guns will come by to ensure compliance “or else”.

Question: how is having the hired guns of government to
extort an extra $8 per hour out of your boss any more moral or any less of a
crime than doing it yourself?

I now turn the thought exercise over to you, the reader, to
complete.

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